Friday, June 26, 2009

I was almost willing to concede that Twitter was a useful new type of communication/news tool during the post-Iran election protests, counter-protests, and government crackdown over there, but just almost: everything still seemed to be second-hand - reports of what CCN, MSNBC, and other cable news networks were showing, and links to different news website. But Michael Jackson's death yesterday seemed to show all the shortcomings of Twitter - nothing new was to be found through Twitter but everyone seemed to want to use it to say nothing new. I made a few screen captures. This first one is from 5:53pm Central Standard Time.

It was taking a long time for any search to run, and when I searched the provided "trending topic" nothing was found. I'm not sure how twitter generates the "trending topics", but I figure they're suggested searches based on common text in some threshold of tweets - they're not manually suggested by read people, are they? So something seemed screwed up early on.

This second screen capture was from about an hour later.

The hashtag search for #michaeljackson took about five minutes to load (and other web sites were loading normally, so it wasn't my connection); the most recent tweet listed was an hour old and about ten minutes later when I took this screen capture, the "more results" listing was up to over 10,000. An hour's worth of tweets queued up? "Real-time" my ass.

In the middle of all this, someone decides this is the perfect time to resurrect what is apparently some old net-rumor that Jeff Goldblum has also died. This image is from 8:24pm CST:

This is about 10-15 minutes after that twending topic loaded and new results - rumors, denials, requests for confirmation and the link to the same fake news story on some joke web site in New Zealand or somewhere else down under - are also well over 10,000 and, as the image shows, the most recent one for this hot topic was from two hours ago. (The tweets do not actually re-load even as the as "more results" thing updates itself.)

Then at 9:47pm CST, Japan and the rest of Asia are just waking up and Twitter is really screwed. My page was loading but anytime I searched for anything this is what I was getting:

Luckily I had saved the #michaeljackson hashtag search saved because about forth-five minutes later:

there's no "trending topics" on Twitter anymore!

At the peak last night, there were about 100 tweets PER SECOND for #michaeljackson, by my rough estimate. Wayyyyy too many to follow. And eventually Twitter had, it seemed, finally "up scaled" its servers or whatever and wasn't hanging up and taking minutes to search for specific hot queries and "trending topics". So was this just a case of Twitter servers not being as quickly "scalable" (or whatever the jargon is) as they had hoped they would be?